Chương 85: Everything is Falling Apart

Aiko was just about to swing her massive black iron greatsword for a highly anticipated second helping of horizontal violence, but Kullervo apparently decided he was completely done taking orders from a teenage girl with a weapon larger than her entire budget.

Before her blade could even begin to cut through the heavy air, the giant wooden colossus flicked his right arm, and those twitchy, prehensile vine fingers shot out like a bundle of hyper aggressive garden hoses, wrapping themselves tightly around her midsection. What followed next was a thoroughly brutal, completely unglamorous masterclass in how to use a human being as a makeshift weed whacker.

Kullervo aggressively slammed poor Aiko multiple times face first into the muddy ground, treating her body like a disgruntled homeowner trying to beat the dust out of a thoroughly ruined living room rug, before casually tossing her far back into the dense, pollution choked forest canopy like a discarded bag of garbage.

With our favorite anxious berserker temporarily launched into orbit, the fifteen foot bipedal mountain turned his faceless torso to focus entirely on Fiona, who was still heroically attempting to chew his left arm off like a hyper persistent, multi ton teddy bear.

Hoping to provide an immediate, highly necessary distraction for our resident apex predator, I raised my Training Prototype-7 revolver and squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession, sending another pair of heavy projectiles screaming across the short gap.

Unfortunately for my personal ego, Kullervo's bloated observation statistics were back online, and the giant casually dodged both incoming bullets with two microscopic, infuriatingly small tilts of his upper torso, letting the metal rounds zip harmlessly past his wooden bark plating. The second my shots missed, Kullervo unhinged his massive wooden jaw to activate Corrosive Mire, aggressively vomiting a wide, high pressure arc of thick, bubbling purple goo across the dead center of the clearing.

The disgusting, acidic slime instantly flooded the entire battlefield, coating the floor like a giant bowl of weaponized toxic soup and melting straight through everything it touched. The boiling purple sludge was so intensely hot and deeply corrosive that Fiona was instantly forced to let go of his arm, releasing a heavy roar of pure pain as the sheer chemical heat began to burn right through her thick bear hide.

I performed a frantic series of highly ungraceful acrobatic maneuvers to dodge the downpour of acidic sludge, a task that was cutting it ridiculously close to statistically impossible considering the weaponized vomit was landing absolutely everywhere like a malfunctioning sprinkler system at a chemical plant.

To make our group survival rating drop even lower into the gutter, the dense, choking wall of toxic purple smoke was aggressively closing in on our positions once again, wrapping around the clearing like a giant, suffocating blanket of pure pollution. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Fiona let out a fierce roar that shook the remaining leaves off the canopy, refusing to let a little chemical burn completely stop her momentum.

She reared back on her massive hind legs and launched a heavy, desperate paw slam straight toward Kullervo's faceless wooden torso, aiming to turn our giant landlord into immediate kindling. To my total psychological horror, the fifteen foot bipedal colossus casually reached out his right hand and caught her multi ton, bone crushing paw completely mid air with a sickening wooden crunch.

Before our resident apex predator could even register that her attack had been effortlessly blocked, Kullervo hoisted his comically oversized left club arm and slammed it straight down onto her heavy frame, delivering a brutal blow that looked like a professional lumberjack trying to break a world record.

Realizing that my team was rapidly being dismantled piece by piece, I executed a quick mental command to swap my weapon loadout, causing my Training Prototype 7 revolver to dissolve into thin air as the long, splinter prone barrel of my Standard Issue Matchlock musket materialized perfectly back into my hands. Before I could even line up a proper shot through the thickening haze, Kullervo aggressively shifted his focus to finish off our furry vanguard.

The giant wooden monster reached out his twitchy, prehensile vine fingers and wrapped them tightly around Fiona's massive bear head, using his overwhelming physical strength to forcefully pry her jaws completely wide open. It was a deeply terrifying sight to behold, as the giant bipedal bunker was actively trying to manually snap her entire jawbone right in half.

I aggressively hoisted the heavy wooden stock of my Standard Issue Matchlock musket to my shoulder, desperately trying to lock my crosshairs onto Kullervo's glowing chest cavity, but the fifteen foot bipedal colossus possessed some seriously infuriating tactical awareness. The giant wooden landlord casually shifted his massive frame, explicitly using Fiona's helpless, multi ton bear body as a giant, furry living shield to completely block my entire line of sight.

I completely froze, my finger hovering over the smooth trigger in a state of sheer, unadulterated hesitation, because as much as I wanted to shoot a giant hole through this overgrown twig, I wasn't quite ready to accidentally lob a blue mana round straight into the back of our resident druid's skull. While I was busy having a miniature existential crisis through my rifle scope, Dimitri was heroically attempting to stage a dramatic comeback.

Our favorite well meaning Russian vanguard was slowly, painfully crawling his way out of the suffocating dirt hole like a highly determined earthworm escaping a heavy downpour, but Kullervo wasn't having any of it.

Without even turning his faceless torso away from Fiona, the giant casually reached out his massive, iron hard wooden boot and aggressively stomped it flat onto Dimitri's back, pinning our burly meat shield directly into the mud with enough crushing pressure to completely short circuit his ability to force his way out.

Over on the sidelines, June was currently transforming into a human lighthouse, her majestic aristocratic profile glowing brighter and brighter by the millisecond as her high damage fire spell continued to brew and crackle with intense thermal energy.

Despite her massive narcissistic urge to vaporize everything in her path, she was actually holding back from releasing the magical apocalypse because her sophisticated brain cells realized that both Dimitri and Fiona were currently sitting dead center inside the lethal blast radius of her impending thermal explosion.

Realizing that our entire synchronized team synergy had completely dissolved into an absolute dumpster fire of epic proportions, I decided it was time to officially throw the tactical playbook right out the window. With a sharp mental flick, my long range musket dissolved into thin air, immediately replaced by the rugged, plain construction of my Deck Sweeper blunderbuss as I prepared to close the distance and go completely all in on a high stakes, point blank suicide run.